"The week before Wei Jingsheng was arrested," wrote his friend Liu Qing, "he was like a wild animal who hears the hunters moving in, seeing shadows of danger in every comer. Yet he was very calm, and had a smile of hope for the future on his face. He came to see me often to talk about what we would do if he was arrested. The last time he came, we talked until very late and as I walked him to the night bus, we found ourselves between two vehicles, one in front and one behind, moving at our walking pace. As he got on the bus, Wei Jingsheng said, laughing, "So, do you think I've been imagining things now?"'
It was as if he knew his arrest was inevitable, but yet he still could not quite believe that the authorities would take this step. Liu Qing recalls that Wei thought he would be treated leniently if arrested. With Holzman, however, Wei went to far as to discuss the possibility that if he was tried, he could be executed. He told her, "I am ready to make the sacrifice." This was no idle remark, since at the time when he was arrested, executions of political prisoners were still quite common. Yet he was adamant that his fellow Exploration editors allow him to take full responsibility for their activities, and should even testify against him if this would bring them lighter punishment. In the end, his colleagues Liu Jingsheng and Yang Guang testified against Wei at his trial. Others, not knowing of this pact, accused them of having betrayed him.
On March 29 in the middle of the night, twenty or so police officers arrived at Wei's home and took him away. This began a sweep of arrests which netted most of the movement's most outspoken activists. Ren Wanding, a founder of the China Human Rights League, was arrested a few days after Wei. On April 1, new regulations were published which said posters could only be put up in designated places and posters, journals and demonstrations which went against the Four Basic Principles were henceforth banned. (The Four Basic Principles stipulated support for the socialist road, the leadership of the CCP, Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and were later enshrined in the 1982 Constitution, which also removed rights contained in previous Chinese constitutions, including the right to strike and to put up "big-character posters.") Even the two most moderate publications, Beijing Spring and Masses Reference News, which had consistently supported Deng Xiaoping, were forced to close.
"One of Wei's friends raced to my house a few months after the arrest to tell me that Wei Jingsheng had requested that I act as his defense lawyer," Liu Qing wrote. "At that time, the Criminal Code had not yet come into force. When I requested that a court official inform us of the charges against Wei and the regulations under which he was to be tried, I was told angrily that such a request was 'an insult to the Chinese legal system.' In any event, we were not even told when Wei's trial was to begin."
In the end, when he went on trial on October 16, 1979, on charges of divulging military secrets to a foreigner and of conducting "counterrevolutionary propaganda and incitement" aimed at overthrowing the socialist system, Wei conducted his own defense. The prosecution called him "a lackey of Vietnam" for allegedly passing information about China's "defensive counterattack" to a foreign journalist. "Rule by socialist law is the embodiment of the will of the proletariat and the numerous laboring people. For this reason each citizen's freedom of speech must adhere to.... the Four Basic Principles," the prosecution argued. "There exists no freedom to violate them but only the freedom to uphold them.... If we allow freedom for such a tiny minority as [Wei Jingsheng's] to spread unchecked as it pleases, the larger number of the population run the risk of losing their own freedoms.... Not only do we refuse to recognize those freedoms which the accused desires, we will even suppress them with the utmost vigor."
The charge that Wei had passed military secrets to a foreigner was based on a conversation he had had on February 20 with Ian Mackenzie, then Reuters correspondent in Beijing. Mackenzie's interpreter, a Chinese-American called Kuo Li, had made a tape of the conversation in which Wei told Mackenzie about China's first moves in the upcoming war against Vietnam, including which generals would be leading the Chinese offensive, how many troops were being mobilized for the attack, and casualty figures during the first days of combat. According to Liu Qing, this information had already been circulating widely in Beijing, and was known by most of the Democracy Wall activists. Furthermore, several sources report that Mackenzie actually checked with the Chinese Foreign Ministry before publishing the information Wei Jingsheng had given him to ask if it had any objections. Tellingly, Mackenzie was not expelled or criticized for the reports he filed. Under great pressure, Kuo Li finally handed over the tape of Wei's conversation to the authorities. The tape was a crucial piece of evidence at Wei's trial and has been cited whenever government authorities have sought to defend his imprisonment. After intellectuals in China began calling for Wei's release in the spring of 1989, portions of the transcript were even published in Chinese newspapers.
On October 16, Wei appeared in the court wearing prison uniform and with his head shaved. Since verdicts in such cases are always decided in advance, the accused is normally presumed guilty before the trial has even begun. Wei was defiant, and refuted the charges against him point by point in a ringing defense of his ideas and actions. On the first charge of leaking confidential military information, under questioning from the judge Wei said that he had heard the information he had given Mackenzie from many different individuals. His actions could not be considered criminal, he said, conceding that "from the point of view of traditional customs in our country it wasn't really proper to discuss such matters, not at that particular time, at least." 'Since it is the duty of all citizens to keep national secrets [according to the Constitution], this presupposes that the citizens know in the first place what the secrets are that they are supposed to keep. That is to say, secrets must be recognizable from the outset as a piece of classified information," Wei argued in his defense statement. "Never once in the period that followed the outbreak of the Sino-Vietnamese War did I come into contact with anything whatsoever marked as a classified secret. Thus, there is no question of my furnishing anyone with anything that can be described as secret in the terms of the legal definition.... Once the Sino-Vietnamese War broke out, it became a major issue of common concern to both the people of our own nation and those in foreign countries. Thus, inevitably, I couldn't help discussing this aspect of the national situation in my talks with foreign journalists and diplomats during this period."
But the main thrust of Wei's defense focused on his own writings and the publication of Exploration, which the prosecution had labeled "counterrevolutionary" and "reactionary." Wei began by arguing that all his writings were revolutionary in the original sense of the word. "The term 'revolutionary' entails following a course of action whereby one moves with the current of historical development, and strives to remove all that is old and conservative which blocks and impedes the flow of history," declared Wei. "Revolution is the struggle of new phenomena against old. To attach the label of 'perpetual revolution' to the will and ambition of those currently in power is tantamount to stifling all other diversity of thought." Then he proceeded by asserting that criticism was vital if China's polity was to develop. "Criticism may not be beautiful or pleasant to hear, nor can it always be completely accurate,' he continued. "If one insists on criticism being pleasant to hear and demands its absolute accuracy on pain of punishment, this is as good as forbidding criticism and banning reforms altogether."
Wei found in the prosecution's charges the very essence of the attitudes that he believed had enslaved China under the Gang of Four. "Those who forbid the critical treatment of Marxism are engaged in the very process of transforming Marxism into a religious faith itself," he said, pointing out that a truly Marxist approach required critical thinking. "Any man has the right to believe and adhere to the theories he holds to be correct, but he should not use legally-binding stipulations to impose on others the theories in which he has faith, since this interferes with the liberties of his fellow men."
Finally, Wei claimed that all his activities had been a legitimate exercise of his constitutional right to freedom of expression. He believed, he said, in a democratic socialism not in the "Soviet-style of dictatorial socialism. "However, he insisted that this theoretical disagreement did not mean that he had intended to overthrow the government, the Party, or socialism. "In the cause of our magazine Exploration, we never once joined with any conspiratorial organization nor did we ever take part in the activities of any violent organization," he said. "Exploration was on sale to the public as a publication designed to explore and probe theoretical problems.... When people ask us if we were ever prepared to participate in armed struggle, or carry out actions aimed at the overthrow of the government, I have already given a precise answer to such a question. I recognize legitimate propaganda and the democratic movement as the indispensable means to foster democratic government. Only when this has been understood by the majority will democratic government gradually come into being."
Since he had refused to plead guilty, the prosecution had called for a "severe" sentence for Wei. There was never any chance, of course, that he would not be convicted as charged. According to Garside, two and a half hours before the trial ended, Xinhua News Agency had already issued a report calling Wei a "counterrevolutionary." "When the members of the hand-picked audience at the 'public trial' came out for their lunch break on the second day of the proceedings," wrote Liu Qing, who was waiting outside the court house along with a number of other Democracy Wall activists, 'they were relaxed and smiling. A journalist friend who had a pass - and gave us the tapes from which the transcript of the trial was made - said Wei Jingsheng had made a rousing speech in his own defense. After five o'clock, when they came out again, the mood was completely different. People looked depressed and there was a heavy, dead silence. All refused to answer our questions about the outcome of the trial. Then a shout came from somewhere: the sentence was 15 years. We were in shock-no one imagined that the sentence would be so heavy.
The shock was felt not only in Beijing; protests against the sentence were heard around the world. Andrei Sakharov appealed for Wei in a telegram addressed "with deep respect" to Premier Hua Guofeng: "I ask you to use your influence to review the sentence of Wei Jingsheng, who was sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment for an open statement in support of the principles of democracy," Sakharov wrote. "Such an act of justice would assist the authority of the PRC and international trust." Democracy Wall activists spoke out vigorously against the sentence. A poster penned by "An Upright Person" pointed out that Marx had written volumes condemning capitalism, yet had failed to topple it, while Wei's oeuvre was minuscule in comparison. "Are the new articles by Wei really more powerful than the works of Marx?" the writer asked. According to evidence presented at Wei's trial, a total of 2,900 copies of Exploration had been sold. And within days, Wei's fellow activists were circulating transcripts of his trial in the capital. April Fifth Forum even had the temerity to publish it in full, which led to the arrest of several people, including Wei's friend Liu Qing.
The Chinese press generally applauded the verdict, and many older dissidents who were just being rehabilitated as Wei was arrested did not utter so much as a word of protest. Several now express regret about their silence. Former People's Daily journalist Liu Binyan, now a prominent figure in the dissident movement, has said that at the time he thought Wei's views were too extreme, and so did not feel sympathetic to his plight. One of the few exceptions was Guo Luoji, a philosophy professor at Beijing University who wrote an article which appeared in People's Daily just after Wei was sentenced. The piece, which was entitled "We Should be Able to Discuss Political Questions," did not mention Wei by name, but the object of his criticism was so clear that within a year, Guo had been sent out of Beijing in disgrace.